ATI breaks revenue record

But Q4 gains slight

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ATI yesterday said its third quarter had yielded record quarterly revenues, with sales up 38.2 per cent on the Q3 2003 but a less impressive six per cent on Q2 2004.

Revenues for the three months to 31 May 2004 totalled $491.5m. That yielded net income of $48.6m (19 cents a share), up just two per cent from Q2's $47.6m but 224 per cent higher than Q3 2003's $12.4m (six cents a share).

To be fair to ATI, it had signalled that Q3 would should relatively small gains over Q2 when it announced its second-quarter numbers back in April. What growth there was came from sales increases in all its key sectors: desktop, mobile, handheld and digital TV chips.

In line with its bullish plan to grab Nvidia's 60-odd per cent share of the desktop GPU market, ATI touted its revenue growth in this area, but provided no figures to back its claim. However, it did say mobile chip sales were up 50 per cent sequentially and by "almost" 50 per cent over the last nine months. Integrated graphics chip sales grew over 20 per cent during the same period.

Gross margins for the quarter rose half a percentage point sequentially to 35.3 per cent. ATI quit the quarter with $508m in the bank.

The company bullishly forecasst Q4 revenues to come in between $510m and $550m, representing sequential growth of 3.8-11.9 per cent.

Gross margins are expected to hit "the upper half" of the company's 32-35 per cent target range. ®